Islam

Cultural pilgrims who trek to the Dutch city of Maastricht for the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) every March can find many things. Throughout the mammoth art Mecca, where curators and collectors shop for everything from Greco-Roman antiquities to hometown-favorite Rembrandts to contemporary sculptures and installations, more than 100,000 tulips and roses adorn the MECC […]
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Don’t tread on the Koran — literally. That’s the sentiment that nearly led to a riot in the French city of Tolouse, reports FRANCE 24.

As part of an installation (Technologia) by Moroccan artist, Mounir Fatmi, Koranic verses were projected onto the bridge, Pont Neuf, which “nearly set off a riot when local Muslim youths saw pedestrians walking on the words,” the television station reports.

According to the report, the projection was supposed to take place on weekends, when pedestrians would be prevented from trampling the projected words, “as this is considered blasphemous by Muslims.”

Ahead of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot (Tabernacles), a Huffington Post article refers to some of the holiday rituals as “weird” and “strange.” This, of course, invites questions about which religious rituals aren’t strange, when viewed from the outside?

And is it really more helpful to talk about how strange a holiday may seem, rather than what all the symbolism means?

If a film or book advocates violent action against people of a certain faith, that work ought to be condemned. But th greatest provocations in “Innocence of Muslims” seem to be suggesting that the Muslim prophet may have had a bloody sword (which would have been typical of the day, and is supported by Islamic texts), and that he drew heavily on Old Testament texts (the same charge can be leveled, for example, at Jesus). So why is the U.S. State Department condemning it?
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Asian Americans display a “mosaic of faiths” — 42 percent is Christian, 14 percent is Buddhist, and 10 percent is Hindu — and “are contributing to the diversity of the U.S. religious landscape,” according to a new study from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
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The cofounders of a new online gallery focusing on photographs from the Gulf region say their site responds to a lack of global awareness of art by photographers in the Gulf, both Muslim and otherwise.

“I think when you start to see people as more multidimensional and concerned with topics you can relate to, they become more human to you,” one of the cofounders says. “And when they become more human to you, a space opens up where understanding and real dialogue can exist. We need that on both sides—America and the Middle East—now more than ever.”

An image which a Jewish organization is denouncing as Nazi-like and anti-Semitic actually may be part of a larger tradition of Jewish art, which has historical ties to the upcoming holiday of Passover.

Even if the controversial Swedish drawing does represent Jews as rats, representations of Jews as animals has been a fixture of Jewish art history at least since the Middle Ages, and some say it’s a legalistic device that helps artists avoid representing humans in an ‘idolatrous’ fashion that violates the Second Commandment.

One wouldn’t necessarily expect to find The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) Maastricht to be bursting at the seams with faith. If the art auction and fair worships at any altar, it would be Mammon’s rather than Apollo’s.

The notion that a camel has a better chance of crawling through the eye of a needle than a rich man does of setting up shop in heaven couldn’t be further from the culture of TEFAF, whose press releases talk of 170 private jets descending on the Maastricht airport and about 65,000 tulips adorning the halls of the convention center.

But whatever the odds, there was a lot to be said about religion and religious art at TEFAF. In virtually ever section of the fair–paintings, antiques, modern, manuscripts, classical antiquities, design, works on paper, and jewelry–there were at least dozens of examples of fascinating works with religious content and themes (and, to be fair, many not so interesting works).